Open Collections

Page, Connor

University of British Columbia

In the journals of Victorian poet, priest, and scholar Gerard Manley Hopkins, the most basic stimulus for writing is meteorological. A catalogue of “fine,” “fair,” “dull,” and “foggy” days keeps the time of personal history. Among the few writings he published during his lifetime are meteorological observations contributed to the popular science journal Nature; responding in part to the after-effects of Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption, these letters are part of a collective project of understanding local weather in connection to a trans-regional, planetary climate. Hopkins’s poetry, meanwhile, returns consistently to the distinctive movements and metamorphoses of clouds and winds. This thesis investigates Hopkins’s engagement with atmospheric science, reading his poetry in dialogue with the global meteorological conversations transacted in Nature in which he enthusiastically participated during the 1880s. The methods of the recent “atmospheric turn” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, I suggest, provide a fruitful point of contact between the concerns of Hopkins’s ecocritics and canonical accounts of his scientific interests. While Hopkins’s characteristic attention to the air reflects the historical emergence of knowledge infrastructures capable of diagnosing and debating atmospheric disruption on a planetary scale, it also bears witness to the accumulating and accelerating geophysical changes named by the Anthropocene. I argue that Hopkins’s works reimagine the dimensions of this newly dynamic atmosphere, taking up its experimental materials to test the boundaries of a structure of feeling and ethical concern accommodating discontinuities in both space and time.

Text

2024-04-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87775

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/